Case studies: what’s new
Dinner DAO
With the tagline ‘let’s pitch in and have meals together’, Dinner DAO operates in cities such as New York and Portland, using technology to bring people together in real life. To become a member, prospective diners must first purchase a Dinner DAO NFT using crypto. From here, the digital money raised from membership NFTs is combined into a shared treasury, which the club’s members use to pay for group dinners when they meet as a collective. Adding a layer of exclusivity to who is in this supper club, only eight Dinner DAO memberships exist per city, with members voting to select which new or revered restaurant to attend.
Bored Breakfast Club
When coffee connoisseurship and Web3 collide, the result is the Bored Breakfast Club, a community subscription run that uses blockchain to unlock limited-edition blends of coffee for members. Created by digital design studio Kléy and Los Angeles-based roastery Yes Plz Coffee, people gain access to Bored Breakfast Club by purchasing ones of 5,000 unique NFTs of breakfast scenes. Through both membership growth and people selling their NFTs, funds that are raised will allow Yes Plz to release new blends more often, while also being used to pay for roasting, packaging and global shipping.
CowDAO
Looking to the future of decentralised food communities, the DAO model could also be used collectively to help reduce the cost of food – a pertinent idea amid global, pandemic-induced inflation. In this vein, crypto-engineer and writer Nat Eliason is taking cues from physical food co-ops, where people donate both money and time to provide greater food access. Eliason's concept – CowDAO – gives members discounts on high-quality meat by investing in a percentage of an animal rather than the whole beast. Over time, as a community is built, prices for this quality produce should fall. ‘As the business and treasury grow, membership gets better and better, and the meat gets cheaper and cheaper,’ explains Eliason.
Analysis: what this means
In the food and drink industry, DAOs and blockchain-based decentralised finance (DeFi) hold vast potential to transform access and ownership.
